


Mortal Instants

by emmerwrites



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Angst, Bad Ending, Character Death, F/M, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Spoilers, I hope, Mercy Killing, One Shot, Past Lives, Patch 5.0: Shadowbringers Spoilers, immortality kind of sucks, nobody here is having a good time, so does being an aether sponge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 18:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20086531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmerwrites/pseuds/emmerwrites
Summary: Brief our moments,Brazen and bright.A dying Warrior of Light gives up hope and goes to Amaurot alone. Emet-Selch has been waiting.





	Mortal Instants

**Author's Note:**

> "When it all becomes too much to bear, seek me out at my abode, in the dark depths of the Tempest. There, you may complete your descent into madness with some dignity, far from prying eyes."
> 
> (this is, quite obviously, a bad end AU)

When she comes to his door she is alone, and barely herself. Her human form is unchanged, but her gait in shambles, her posture defeated and weary--bright but drooping like a wilted rose. Her footfalls echo softly as her feet move with an unrecognizable hesitation, her head turning about as if looking for things unseen. She appears faded at the edges, somehow, as if her flesh is caught in-between states, but what Emet-Selch can see clearly now is her eyes: snow-white, tainted.

She must be all but blind by now, he thinks.

“You’re late, hero,” his voice echoes but she looks directly to its source. He expects a frown or at least a furrowed brow, but her pale face remains unchanged.

“I’m early,” she rebukes, “I still have my wits, don’t I?”

Emet-Selch chuckles darkly. “Your wits and your fire,” he agrees, “Is there a fight yet left in you, I wonder?”

A mirthless smile passes over her face. He wonders if she has come with the intent to kill him: to face him on her own and end it all _ without _ the help of her precious friends. Such a plan is utterly foolish, of course, but he cannot help but appreciate such an exquisite example of mortal confidence.

What a waste.

She’s opened her mouth to reply but there are no words before she convulses into a cough she tries to muffle with a shaking hand. Her knees buckle and light breaks from her skin; doubled over she claws at the polished marble floor with a choked sob of pain.

Poor thing.

He crosses the foyer to meet her with a peculiar but genuine _ pity, _something bothersome and longing and far too old. He labours his tired form to one knee before her while she seethes in bright agony--shining white blood falls from her lips and bitter, mortal tears from her eyes. This is a fight she cannot win.

“The worst has yet to come, I’m afraid,” he tells her in a sigh, “I understand the change is quite painful.”

It’s true and it’s cruel and for some illogical reason he regrets saying it aloud. He watches her suffer knowing she will only suffer more, and the thought brings him no pleasure. 

It makes him sick to his pathetic vessel’s stomach. Such a disappointment. She could have been so much more. What she was meant to be. 

She tries to sit up and instead falls forward. Her shaking hands grab desperately at his robes. He takes hold of her wrists to pull her away, to recoil, but is stunned to inaction by her voice:

“Help me,” she says brokenly.

When she looks up--struggling to make eye contact--the sight inspires both a sort of scientific curiosity and a vexing, broiling weight in his chest. Her eyes search for his, and in her too-pale face he searches in kind. Ironic, some part of him thinks, with her appearance altered by the light she looks more familiar. Here before him in her failure she appears somehow closer to the perfection of his memory. He wants to laugh, but cannot.

“Why did you come, if not for knowing this was the end?” Emet-Selch asks her. “There is naught even I can do for you now.”

Her hands are fists in the furs of his collar, shaking him when her body is wracked by another spasm of light. 

“No,” she gasps as if drowning. He wonders if she is. “Help me remember.”

Of course, he thinks, She was ever the curious one. Meddling. Prodding him for information at every turn. Exhausting.

And yet now she begs of him the one thing he would tell her, the knowledge he would give her without hesitation. Her pitiful, fumbling ignorance has led her back to him, finally--after millenia of waiting, millennia of searching, all crystalizes into this moment in which all he can do is refuse.

"It is too late now," he hates the weakness in his voice. 

It’s too late. She will be dead or abomination in no time at all, what could possibly come from revealing the truth to her now? He wonders if she would remember at all, or if it would it be as another myth, another story painted on a stone wall, no more than a shadow.

"_Please _," a plea through clenched teeth. The word hurts. "I want to know. While I’m still me.”

Emet-Selch softens the grip on her wrists when her head droops again. Her warmth is overwhelming and strange when she slumps against his chest. It is he who remembers now, in painful bursts of clarity, remembers what he has always known and longed for her to know.

Time itself holds its breath while the light calms again and for a while, the silence deafens.

"Very well, my dear," he finally concedes. The epithet escapes from somewhere ancient and unpracticed, his voice thick with an old, forgotten gentleness. 

Not forgotten after all, here at the end.

He sighs, and smiles ruefully. "Where to begin?"

+

Silence and stillness gather, and Emet-Selch wonders if the Warrior is asleep. He scoffs. 

“Honestly, after all of that begging, you could at least _ try _ to stay awake,” he says, “I’m not going to repeat myself.”

“I’m listening,” she murmurs. “I’ve heard every word.”

“_And? _ Have you nothing to say?”

Her eyes are closed, but he cannot read her expression in the dim light. She stirs against him and he’s startled by the sudden reminder of her weight, her physical presence: the body tearing itself apart from the inside with white, immaculate claws. 

He tells himself he only abides by holding her this way out of convenience-- besides, it would be most unbecoming to allow his guest to lie in a smear of her own tainted blood in his foyer. It was enough of an effort for his aching limbs merely getting her off of the floor, but now at least they could both be somewhat comfortable. 

Familiarly comfortable, if he dared admit. 

“I always wondered what it was you saw in me,” she rasps, and he swears she is almost smiling.

She is different, of course. She is extraordinary.

"and maybe… what I saw in you."

_Smirking._

“I guess now I know.”

Light flickers in her skin and her face contorts in pain but she does not cry out. The flesh rebels, valiantly, but he can feel her fading. He wonders what sort of shape she will take. 

"Now you know,” he says, “Though I doubt you remember.”

“You loved her,” she says after a long silence, and that word, that _ damnable word _ sticks in his _ own _ throat like a jagged stone. She shakes and crumples in on herself like paper in a flame, the particles of her being threatening to pull apart into sparkling embers. 

Her words come out more quietly when she presses further: "Didn't you?"

Yes.

But why must she ask, _of all things?_

"That is long in the past now,” he lies.

_ “Bullshite, _” the dying Warrior snaps weakly, “Isn’t that what all of this is for? Isn’t that why you invited me here?”

_So you could be with her one last time?_

Emet-Selch says nothing. He casts his gaze out into the starry expanse of Amaurot’s countless windows--windows he _ could _ actually report the number of, if pressed--while emptiness expands within him beyond measure. 

Her fervor causes more of her frail restraints to snap and the sickness takes advantage. Bright lances of light pierce and explode and she whimpers and gasps and clings to him. Her skin is breaking; he watches cracks forming in a perfect mortal surface to create one anew. 

She is strong. She will survive this, whatever is left of her--whatever the pain of her transformation does not extinguish. She will be resplendent and terrifying and suffer every second she lives.

She is full of fear and agony, but still that fire and that insatiable, infuriating questioning--

“Hades,” she says, and he stops breathing, for he had never told her his name--“Do you love _ me?” _

His breath returns in force. How _ dare _ she disarm him so. The _ nerve _ \--the naked mortal _ audacity _ . Brazen and bright even in her weakest moment, vexing him into madness even on the very edge of her own existence. That _ this _ is how she would spend her final breaths! His fingers grip her shoulder like a vice, and he is exhausted by the violence with which he resists replying _ “How could I not?” _

“Oh, come now,” he manages to say instead, “Now is hardly the time for such foolish questions.”

He is almost blinded by her; when her head falls back over his arm something compels him to cradle it with his other hand. 

“I know,” her voice is jagged, “I remember.”

Her mask and cowl have fallen away and for a torturous instant he can see her clearly again: he can hear her voice and remember, remember, to the point it consumes him. Something weak and ancient in him breaks and he falls into the desperate madness of memory. By impulse, by instinct, he crushes her in his arms while the light burns them both.

_ Help me, _she begs him again.

Her flesh is breaking. She screams, muffled by his collar but reverberating through his bones. Seconds drag in an eternity as eternity dies, again--as the one constant fades into what will only rise again as a twisted horror. 

Emet-Selch is not a man without mercy, nor is he one to forsake his cause. The hero deserves a hero’s death, but the hero cannot be suffered to live. 

Nor can the one he loves live only to suffer.

Light burns behind his eyelids and shadowy fingers grasp at a panicked, racing pulse of life--he holds tightly and the weight is overwhelming, it _ hurts. _ It’s a pulse he knows as well as his own and it’s beating in a body far too fragile. Vibrations of strings play familiar music from the wrong instrument.

He cannot take it any longer: shadows squeeze and sever and his disappointment over the Warrior’s lack of will to fight back is eclipsed by the agonizing, crushing relief of granting his friend the peace she deserves. He silences her cries of pain and tastes the white, shining blood in her mouth; he calls her by her name and tastes nothing when she vanishes into glittering oblivion.

How transient, how insignificant, how utterly aggravating: mortality has failed him yet again. It has failed both of them. Emet-Selch is alone in his city once more, a wandering shadow in the held breath of its final days. The moments pass imperceptibly, the weight of millennia hang upon his tired shoulders, but he has no time to mourn. 

When it is all over, he opens his eyes in the dark to regard his empty hands, and sighs.

What a disappointment.

**Author's Note:**

> Please do yourselves a favor and look at the incredible illustration I commissioned for this story [HERE.](https://nipuni.tumblr.com/post/620569267774111744/commission-for-aethernoise-from-her-fic-mortal)
> 
> ...and if you're a FFXIV fanfic author and/or reader and would like to scream (or lurk) among like-minded and aggressively supportive folk, pay a visit the [Book Club,](https://discord.gg/aP6MQ2Z) where I continue to be inspired and enabled.


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